Tom Wolf campaign worker loses job over plagiarism controversy

Gubernatorial rival accused Wolf of copying without attribution. Wolf's campaign said the language was a mistake.

Tom Wolf's campaign dismissed the person it said was responsible for passages in a major policy plan that matched parts of reports by a heating and cooling system supplier with York County ties.

The action came after U.S. Rep. Allyson Y. Schwartz's campaign criticized Wolf, saying parts of his major policy plan were copied without attribution from reports by Johnson Controls.

"Tom Wolf claims to be a different type of candidate," Schwartz campaign spokesman Mark Bergman said in a news release Thursday. "He says he will take us in a new direction with a 'Fresh Start' policy, yet the words aren't even his own."

Later on Thursday, the Wolf campaign said the language in question was a mistake.

"I have directed the staff to make sure nothing like this ever happens again and have asked for a new process to be put in place to ensure it does not," Wolf said in a written statement.

Mark Nicastre, a Wolf spokesman, later said the campaign "terminated the person responsible." Nicastre declined to name the person.

Wolf, a York County businessman and former state revenue secretary, is one of four Democratic candidates for governor, along with Schwartz, state Treasurer Rob McCord and former state environmental protection secretary Katie McGinty. He has been leading in the polls. The primary is May 20.

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Wolf's about 45-page "A Fresh Start" plan was released by the campaign in February. It covers his positions on raising the minimum wage, placing a 5 percent extraction tax on natural gas drilling, increasing education funding and other issues.

A section about expanding clean energy has parts that match policy papers of Johnson Controls Inc., a Milwaukee-based company that has operations in York County. The Schwartz campaign said the company has tens of millions of dollars in state government contracts.

The Schwartz campaign highlighted four paragraphs from the "A Fresh Start" plan that have the same language as Johnson Controls' policy papers.

For instance, this passage in the Wolf plan is nearly identical to part of a 2010 policy paper from Johnson Controls:

"Business and policy leaders from all political persuasions increasingly are examining ways to expand implementation of energy efficiency, especially in building facilities. In the U.S. alone, buildings account for more than 70 percent of electricity use and almost 40 percent of CO2 emissions."

Nicastre said the campaign collected great ideas from many different sources — the public sector, the private sector and nonprofits. He said the plan specifically cites more than 20 references to other studies and articles that served as some of the foundation of the plan.

"It was important to us to give credit where credit was due. The language that has been pointed out should never have appeared in the manner in which it did," Nicastre said in an email. "We are putting processes in place to make sure this does not happen again. This was a mistake and we regret it."

The same paragraph about energy efficiency cites a 2012 Deutsche Bank Group/Rockefeller Foundation study. Later, in a section about senior care options, the policy plan references a study by AARP and the Commonwealth Fund.